The Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) has decided not to take legal action against Google at the end
of a 19-month investigation into the search giant.It found Google had not
biased its search results to favor its products. Google has agreed to give
advertisers access to more information about their campaigns and has agreed not
to use other providers' material such as product reviews in its search results.
Google is still awaiting a competition ruling from the European Commission.
Another key concession applies to how Google uses the patents it bought when it
acquired Motorola Mobility last year for $12.5bn (£7.9bn).Google has said it
will charge "fair and reasonable" rates to companies that need to use
its standard essential patents. Standard essential patents are ones that are
critical to industry standards, for example, the technology that allows devices
such as smart phones and tablets to connect to the internet over Wi-Fi. It has
agreed not to take out injunctions forcing licensees to remove their products
from sale if there are disagreements about how much a fair rate should be.
'DISAPPOINTING
AND PREMATURE'
Rivals had called for
stronger sanctions to be taken against Google. Fairsearch, an organization
representing several of Google's critics such as Microsoft, said in a
statement: "The FTC's decision to close its investigation with only
voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature, coming just
weeks before the company is expected to make a formal and detailed proposal to
resolve the four abuses of dominance identified by the European Commission,
first among them biased display of its own properties in search results."The
FTC was asked to investigate whether Google was favoring its own products in
search results.FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz told a press conference that the
commission had found no evidence that Google's search engine was biased towards
its own services."Some may believe the commission should have done more,
but for our part we do follow the facts where they lead," he said."We
do it with appropriate rigour. This brings to an end the investigation. It is
good for consumers, it is good for competition and it is the right thing to
do."One of the biggest changes to be implemented by Google will allow
advertisers to copy ad campaign data to other search engines, such as
Microsoft's Bing. Google is also promising that it will stop copying content
from other websites to use in its summaries, even though the company had
insisted the practice was legal under the fair-use provisions of US copyright
law.
In response to the
settlement, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said in a blog post:
"The US Federal Trade Commission today announced it has closed its
investigation into Google after an exhaustive 19-month review that covered
millions of pages of documents and involved many hours of testimony."The
conclusion is clear: Google's services are good for users and good for
competition."
BIG
FINE
It does not mean that
the search giant is out of the woods on the issue of anti-competitive
practices. Alongside the FTC investigation, Google is still under scrutiny from
the European Union. In December, the EU's Competition Commission gave the
search giant a month to address four key areas: the manner in which Google
displays "its own vertical search services differently" from other,
competing product show Google "copies content" from other websites -
such as restaurant reviews - to include within its own services the
"exclusivity" Google has to sell advertising around search terms
people userestrictions on advertisers from moving their online ad campaigns to
rival search engines Google is expected to respond to these concerns shortly. If
found guilty of breaching EU anti-trust rules, Google would face a fine of up
to $4bn (£2.5bn).
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